We woke up Saturday morning with the plan of buying some doors for the house, just the major exterior doors. I figured about $200 each for the side exterior doors, which had an ugly color and needed new locks and the front door in between $300 and $400 for a nice wood door. All of this would be installed by none other than D & G Construction(Donovan and Garcia or me and the wife). So $800 worth of doors sounded a little crazy to me, so we looked over the doors and decided that they were in decent working condition, just needed some help to make them "PoP" or by my definition have them be noticed.
So we could paint the side doors and install some new door handles and they should be good to go, sounds easy, ha ha I laugh at that statement. So after some help from the Home Depot and some brushes, paint, locks, we were in on the side doors for about $50 total. That's a savings of about $350! Read that again, we had working doors and we needed some paint and some locks and we have a fresh new look. My wife gets 99% of the credit on painting and the locks. The color next to it is what it looked like, we still plan to update the trim, but we are heading in the right direction.
My project proved to be quite harder and probably a bit more expensive, but I did get an electric sander out of the deal. My door is an old door that needs some TLC, or whatever is greater than that. After trying out a couple stains on the door, which should look pretty nice. We realized that the door hates us, it took me about an hour to get the screws out of the door, to take it off the hinges. This could be from painting of the screws about 45 years ago, maybe the screws being a little stripped, not sure, but I am sure that's sarcasm.
What did this all mean? More Home Depot visits. Here is a list of stuff we bought to hopefully make this work.
- Deadbolt and Handles-$50
- 2 Cover plates(covering the 1945 handles that are know where to be found)-$15
- Extra long door plate to close the door(I'm new to this, I'm sure it has a real name)-$12
- Stain-$12
- Sealant-$10
- Sandpaper-$5
- Drill bit for my 12 Volt drill(this didn't work out to well BTW)-$8
- Electric Sander with Sanding paper-$56
- I'm sure there is more but that's the bulk of it
So this is just an estimate, but about $175, which means another savings of about $225! I'm gonna take it.
Now I learned a lesson that apparently I did not in 6th grade Tech Ed class, thanks Mr. Larson, but if you are stripping the paint from a door, don't do it by hand or with your battery operated drill. But I made some headway and I'm about 75% done with the sanding I want to get done. The inside of the door frames is what the original color looks like. Take a look, not bad. So this is how some of my Saturday and Sunday were spent. I'm hoping to finish up the sanding and staining by Tuesday and have this door hung and ready by the end of the week.
